Short Summary Of Arranged Marriage By Divakaruni

Divakaruni, a product of the postcolonial feminism, creates a female universe out of the conventional male world. In her works, conventional geography is rejected. The rejection of other male definitions of the world automatically follows. She places her women characters, mostly with good educational background and yet hailing from unfair traditional family set-up, in conflict with a parochial society, and depicts their struggle to pop out of the shells. They break free themselves from the past conventional emotions and resolve to move into the new world of American ideologies due to severe hardships inflicted on them in the name of Indian tradition and custom. As there is no panacea for their social ills in their native land, they find American culture as the liberating agent that offers relief and redemption for the cultural cringe developed in them by their native culture.

It has 11 short stories, and majority of them deals with the immigrant’s cultural crisis along with subjugation of women. She has written with an insight and consideration, in a language that is expressive as well as uncomplicated. It takes the readers deep into the many-layered worlds of her characters, the world that is crammed with terror, optimism and discovery. In an interview in The telegraph, March 13th 2005 she says that women in particular respond to her works because she is writing about them- women in love, women in difficulty, women in relationship. She wants people to relate to her characters so that they can feel their joy and pain, since it will be harder to be prejudiced when they meet them in real